t the only road to such a consummation was a path
of blood.

The Lutheran preachers, on the other hand, obedient to the summons from
Dresden, vied with each other in every town and village in heaping
denunciations, foul names, and odious imputations on the Catholics; while
the Calvinists, not to be behindhand with their fellow Reformers,
celebrated the jubilee, especially at Heidelberg, by excluding Papists
from hope of salvation, and bewailing the fate of all churches sighing
under the yoke of Rome.

And not only were the Papists and the Reformers exchanging these blasts
and counterblasts of hatred, not less deadly in their effects than the
artillery of many armies, but as if to make a thorough exhibition of
human fatuity when drunk with religious passion, the Lutherans were
making fierce paper and pulpit war upon the Calvinists. Especially Hoe,
court preacher of John George, ceaselessly hurled savage libels against
them. In the name of the theological faculty of Wittenberg, he addressed
a "truehearted warning to all Lutheran Christians in Bohemia, Moravia,
Silesia, and other provinces, to beware of the erroneous Calvinistic
religion." He wrote a letter to Count Schlick, foremost leader in the
Bohemian movement, asking whether "the unquiet Calvinist spirit, should
it gain ascendency, would be any more endurable than the Papists. Oh what
woe, what infinite woe," he cried, "for those noble countries if they
should all be thrust into the jaws of Calvinism!"

Did not preacher Hoe's master aspire to the crown of Bohemia himself? Was
he not furious at the start which Heidelberg had got of him in the race
for that golden prize? Was he not mad with jealousy of the Palatine, of
the Palatine's religion, and of the Palatine's claim to "hegemony" in
Germany?

Thus embittered and bloodthirsty towards each other were the two great
sections of the Reformed religion on the first centennial jubilee of the
Reformation. Such was the divided front which the anti-Catholic party
presented at the outbreak of the war with Catholicism.

Ferdinand, on the other hand, was at the head of a comparatively united
party. He could hardly hope for more than benevolent neutrality from the
French government, which, in spite of the Spanish marriages, dared not
wholly desert the Netherlands and throw itself into the hands of Spain;
but Spanish diplomacy had enslaved the British king, and converted what
should have been an active and most powerful enem